1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data delivery system, and more particularly to a data delivery system which transports data that has previously been stored in a sending station to at least one receiving station. The present invention further relates to a sending station which serves as part of the data delivery system, and a computer-readable storage medium storing a program which causes a computer system to function as a sending station.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a trend in recent years for manufacturing companies to produce a wide variety of goods in high quantities, confronting shortened product lifecycles and diversified consumer needs. Those companies have consequently accumulated a large volume of document data including engineering drawings created with computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) tools. They have to store and manage such document data efficiently, as well as to quickly retrieve what they need. In this area of interest, product data management (PDM) systems are proposed as suitable facilities for providing necessary services. PDM systems are designed to manage product data in an organized and unified manner, from development phase to production phase. Besides preventing any document-related problems from happening, they improve the productivity of engineering processes by maximizing the reuse of design data.
In such conventional PDM systems, engineering drawings and other documents are delivered in digital form to internal and external organizational units that need them, by referring to destination tags attached to the data and utilizing workflow paths. Although this has been a common way of data distribution in conventional systems, it is likely to raise some reliability issues because the process depends on management by humans. In some cases, data files may be delivered to unintended places, or some necessary destinations may be left out. Conventional PDM systems also lack an affinity for firewall devices. To protect important data against tampering and theft, most systems deploy a firewall at the point where they are connected to a public network environment. Firewall devices, however, often slow down the rates of data transport, causing slow system response.